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On the eve of the OpenStack design summit, it’s worth noting that the Crowbar team at Dell cut our final Essex release (aka Betty) last week. We’ve also committed the initial Folsom deployment scripts to the 1x development trunk under “feature/folsom” if you are doing Crowbar builds from DevTool (see bit.ly/crowbardevtool).

Andi Abes is presenting about the new Pull From Source (pfs) feature at the Summit on Monday. There’s a feature branch for that too and I’m going to check with him and try to post and ISO for that too.

Last week, my team at Dell led a world-wide OpenStack Essex Deploy event. Kamesh Pemmaraju, our OpenStack-powered solution product manager, did a great summary of the event results (200+ attendees!). What started as a hack-a-thon for deploy scripts morphed into a stunning 14+ hour event with rotating intro content and an ecosystem showcase (videos). Special kudos to Kamesh, Andi Abes, Judd Maltin, Randy Perryman & Mike Pittaro for leadership at our regional sites.

Clearly, OpenStack is attracting a lot of interest. We’ve been investing time in content to help people who are curious about OpenStack to get started.

On that measure, we have room for improvement. We had some great discussions about how to handle upgrades and market drivers for OpenStack; however, we did not spend the time improving Essex deployments that I was hoping to achieve. I know it’s possible – I’ve talked with developers in the Crowbar community who want this.

If you wanted more expert interaction, here are some of my thoughts for future events.

Expert track did not get to deploy coding. I think that we need to simply focus more even tightly on to Crowbar deployments. That means having a Crowbar Hack with an OpenStack focus instead of vice versa.

Efforts to serve OpenStack n00bs did not protect time for experts. If we offer expert sessions then we won’t try to have parallel intro sessions. We’ll simply have to direct novices to the homework pages and videos.

Combining on-site and on-line is too confusing. As much as I enjoy meeting people face-to-face, I think we’d have a more skilled audience if we kept it online only.

Connectivity! Dropped connections, sigh.

Better planning for videos (not by the presenters) to make sure that we have good results on the expert track.

This event was too long. It’s just not practical to serve Europe, US and Asia in a single event. I think that 2-3 hours is a much more practical maximum. 10-12am Eastern or 6-8pm Pacific would be much more manageable.

Some important general notes:

There is HOMEWORK if you want to get ahead by installing OpenStack yourself.

For last minute updates about the event, I recommend that you join the Crowbar Listserver.

Content Logistics work like this.

Everything will be available ONLINE. We are also coordinating many physical sites as rally points.

Introductory: FOUR 3-hour sessions for people who do not have OpenStack or Crowbar experience. These sessions will show how to install OpenStack using Crowbar, discuss DevOps and showcase companies that are in the OpenStack ecosystem. They are planned to have 2 European slots (afternoon & evening), 3 US slots (morning, afternoon & evening), and 1 Asian slot (morning).

Expert: ON-GOING deep technical sessions for engineers who have OpenStack and/or Crowbar experience. There will be one main screen and voice channel in which we are planning to highlight and discuss these topics in blocks throughout the day. We have a long list of topics to discuss and will maintain an ongoing Google Hangout for each topic. Depending on interest, we will jump back and forth to different hangouts.

Intro/Overview Session Logistics work like this

We’re planning FOUR introductory sessions throughout the day (read ahead?). Each session should be approximately 3 hours. The first hour of the sessions will be about OpenStack Essex and installing it using Crowbar. After some Q&A, we’re going to highlight the OpenStack ecosystem. The schedule for the ecosystem is in flux and will likely shift even during the event.

The Session start times for Overview & Ecosystem content

Region

EDT

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Session 4

Europe (-5)

-5

3pm

6pm

*

*

Americas Eastern

0

10am

1pm

4pm

*

Americas Central

+1

9am

Noon

3pm

*

Americas Mtn

+2

*

11am

2pm

7pm

Americas West

+3

*

10am

1pm

6pm

Asia (Toyko)

+10

*

*

*

6/1 10 am

* There are no planned live venues at this time/region. You are always welcome to join online!

Experts Track Logistics

We have a list of topics (Essex, Quantum, Networking, Pull from Source, Documentation, etc) that we plan to cover on a 30-60 minute rotation.

We will cover the OpenStack Essex deploy at the start of each planned session (9am, Noon, 3pm & 8pm EDT). Before we cover the OpenStack deploy, we’ll spend 10 minutes setting (and posting) the agenda for the next three hours based on attendee input.

Even if we are not talking about a topic on the main channel, we will keep a dialog going on topic specific Google hangouts. The links to the hangouts will be posted with the Expert track agenda.

An OpenStack Deploy Hack-a-thon is like 3-liter bottle of distilled open source community love. Do you want direct access to my Dell team of OpenStack/Crowbar/Hadoop engineers? Are you just getting started and want training about OpenStack and DevOps? This is the event for you!

Here’s the official overview:

The OpenStack Deploy hack-a-thon focuses on automation for deploying OpenStack Essex with Dell Crowbar and Opscode Chef. This is a day-long, world-wide event bringing together developers, operators, users, ecosystem vendors and the open source cloud curious. (read below: We are looking for global sites and leaders to extend the event hours!)

OpenStack is the fastest growing open source cloud infrastructure project with broad market adoption from major hardware and software vendors. Crowbar is an Apache 2 licensed, open infrastructure deployment tool and is one of the leading multi-node deployers for OpenStack and Hadoop.

Learn first-hand how OpenStack and Crowbar can make it easy to deploy and operate your own cloud environments.

The Deploy day will offer two individual parallel tracks with something for both experts and beginners:

Newbies n00bs will learn the basics of OpenStack, Crowbar and DevOps and how they can benefit your organization. We’ll also have time for ecosystem vendors to discuss how they are leveraging OpenStack.

Experts l33ts will take a deep dive into new features of OpenStack Essex and Crowbar, and learn how Crowbar works under the hood, which will enable them to extend the product using Crowbar Barclamps.

Note: If you’re a n00b but want l33t content, we’ll be offering online training materials and videos to help get you up to speed.

Why now? We’ve validated our OpenStack Essex deployment against the latest release bits from Ubuntu. Now it’s time to reach out to the OpenStack and Crowbar communities for training, testing and collaborative development.

Please RSVP so that we know how much food to get! SUSE is this Month’s sponsor for food and my team at Dell continues to pickup the room rental. We have 35 RSVPs as of Monday noon – this will be another popular meeting (last meeting minutes).

With the Summit next week, I think it is very important that we pre-discuss Summit topics and priorities as a community. It will help us be more productive individually and for our collective interests when we engage the larger community next week.